Norway
by eeveekitty85
Summary: I first met the Doctor on the beach. Oneshot, 10th Doctor.


**Norway**

I first met the Doctor on the beach.

Norway was a beautiful country, and somehow made more beautiful by the freezing cold of winter. I refused to go anywhere hot and sunny, and certainly not in summer. This was my holiday, my salvation, and the last thing I wanted to see was tourists.

I can remember the first time I saw a fjord. To anyone else I would have looked mad, laughing to myself on top of a cliff at some old memory from a story book, but to me it was just magic. Standing what felt like hundreds of feet in the air, I watched the churning sea below me as it battered it's way into land. I childishly felt like I could fly. I got so far as to stretch my arms out wide and rise up onto my toes, the wind whipping so fast around my face that it felt like it was slapping me. It brought me back to my senses, and I moved away from the edge. Only an idiot, I told myself. Only an idiot would. And I was getting better.

I discovered the beach quite by accident, but I was very glad of it afterwards. Even if I hadn't stumbled across him, I would have been happy just to go there. The bay was as beautiful and majestic as the fjord, although the sea seemed calmer here. It didn't roar it's way right up to the cliff, it surged gently backwards and forwards, leaving miles of glistening wet sand. I stared at those grey waters for what seemed like hours. If I hadn't turned and looked around me at last, I would have missed him.

He was alone like me. That was what first struck me about him, that he was alone. Maybe not like me though. I was happy to be by myself. I was more at peace than I had been for years, and I told myself I didn't need company. But as my feet took me subconsciously closer, his face betrayed some of his story. Being alone for him was like being without air, and he was slowly suffocating.

That wasn't what took me closer. That wasn't what lead me to introduce myself and take his hand in mine. If he had just been alone and sorry about it, I would have thought he was mourning and left him to it. But the instant I saw his eyes, I somehow understood. He wasn't mourning. He was past that. Grief was consuming him piece by piece. I can't really explain how I knew. I'm probably just being vain by presuming I was the first one to notice. But his eyes were dead, blank, and empty of tears because he'd cried them all away.

I flatter myself by saying that he needed me, but it wasn't me he needed and it never would be. He needed someone who was long gone, someone he would never get back. He'd even given up fighting by that time I think, and in some ways that was the worst of it. But he needed some company, we both did. We had both been far too independent and I wasn't foolish enough to think that it wouldn't destroy us both.

"You've been standing here too long. Your hands are freezing," I noted.

"My hands are always cold," he said. "But you're right. It's been too long."

"So let's go inside. There's a café not far from here. A cup of tea or some hot chocolate would do us both good," I said, chancing a smile. He smiled back weakly, as though it was something he'd forgotten how to do.

The hot tea did it's work in thawing him out a little, and it wasn't long before I first heard him laugh, saw him grin. He caught my hand across the tabletop.

"Thank you," he said sincerely. "What you've done…"

"What I've done, anyone else could," I insisted quickly. "You may be a mystery, but you're hardly difficult to crack out of your shell. You're too used to being friendly." He laughed at that.

"You'd be surprised," he said. "I've not always been like this. I was a crotchety old bugger once."

"Ahh, but you came out smiling," I said.

We sat in that café until it closed, getting to know each other. It took me that time to understand why he took my hand as often as he did, and I think by the end of it he'd only just understood why I held his so gladly.

"It's dark already," I said as we came out of the café. I wrapped my scarf tightly around my neck.

"I like the scarf," he said, seemingly amused by it.

"My mad old granny made it. It's much too long," I complained, wrapping it round again.

"It's the perfect length," he said, his eyes twinkling. I stopped and looked at him curiously. He fidgeted slightly, unnerved. "What?"

"Your eyes," I said at last. "You've smiled quite a bit, but that's the first time I've seen your eyes change." He didn't reply after that, just silently squeezed my hand. It was another thank you. He was a polite man, the Doctor, but he never quite realised that he helped me just as much as I helped him.

………………………………

"What brought you to Norway?" he asked later as we sat on the beach.

I stayed silent for a moment, watching the stars. "I needed to recuperate," I said. "Regenerate even. I made a bit of a mess of my life, so I came here to start fresh. It's lovely but…somehow it doesn't seem far enough away."

"You're escaping?" he asked.

"You could call it that," I agreed. "But it's alright now. I'm healing, I think. What about you?"

"The opposite," he admitted. "I'd had enough of escaping. I needed to come back."

"You're not Norwegian."

"No. This beach though. This bay." He didn't say any more and I wasn't about to interrogate him.

"I'm not sure where I can go next though," I said, voicing my biggest worry for the first time. "This world doesn't seem big enough for me."

He picked at the cuff of his coat. "You could…you could come with me," he said hesitantly. I looked at him, but I couldn't see his face properly in the dark.

"Why? Can you take me somewhere better?" I said, laughing.

"I wouldn't laugh if I were you. Not just yet," he said, and even in the gloom I saw his grin.

That was the beginning. And not long after, I saw the stars that I had watched from Bad Wolf Bay while he laughed beside me. Smug git, I said, shoving him so that he tripped and had to catch hold of the console to stop himself falling. He just kept on grinning while I gazed at the scanner. It was the first time I saw a star that close up. It wouldn't be the last.

………………………………

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